Nope. Stop using the medical word addiction in contexts where it's highly inappropriate. Youtube isn't even a single thing. It's just a video hosting service. The types of videos on it are extremely wildly varying.
Video addiction is not a thing. See how stupid it sounds when you say it like it is?
Nope. Stop using the medical word addiction in contexts where it's highly inappropriate. The Internet isn't even a single thing. It's just a collection of content. The types of content on it are extremely wildly varying.
Internet addiction is not a thing. See how stupid it sounds when you say it like it is?
Outside of lampooning how absurd your comment sounds, I don't think it's your place to call if something is a valid addiction or not, and addictions don't have to be strictly medically defined to be considered as such. Just because there isn't some ICD-10 definition for "YouTube addiction" doesn't mean it can't exist, because addiction fundamentally just means a dependence or habitual occupation with something.
And so, is Youtube addiction as debilitating as something like alcoholism? I think most people would say absolutely not, but presumably it's distressing enough to the writer of the post that they have formed a habit around watching (a lot of) it, perceive it as a negative, and want to change it. I would colloquially consider this an addiction.
Absolutely. There is also no such thing as internet addiction. When you compare drug based addictions to things people enjoy the difference is clear. The drugs create increased incentive salience even without enjoyment. This is very different from say, watching a video where you actually have to enjoy it intrinsically many times before it alters incentive salience.
There's a reason the DSM5 and ICD-10 don't have any of the "internet addiction" "video game addiction" "porn addiction" or other cult concepts that scammers use to defraud people of their money. They aren't actually addiction.
Please define addiction for me. My point was not to say that all addictions are equal (they are not), and they act differently, but I think it's too simplistic to flippantly state that Internet addiction is not a thing.
Addiction is when the motivation for a stimuli is divorced from reward from the stimuli and the animal keeps exposing itself to the stimuli regardless. But socially in humans this is acceptable until the addiction begins to have detrimental effects on the person being able to care for themselves. In almost all cases the simuli capable of doing this are drugs that bypass actual perception and internally/chemically tweak the balance for motivation.
There's not even a thing called "Gambling Addiction". Only, "Gambling disorder" and it's the only behavioral "addiction" recognized by the DSM-5.
> Stop using the medical word addiction in contexts where it's highly inappropriate. Youtube isn't even a single thing
You're playing with semantics in a context where
1) everyone understands what the author is saying when talking about addiction, making it appropriate to convey what they mean
2) the word pre-dates DSM, the fact that DSM defines that in a medical sense doesn't change the definition from the dictionary, which fits very much with what the author is describing (1). That's very much you getting angry at sound engineers because they are not engineers per the sense of professional colleges, whereas that's how their profession is called.
3) Give time to all the troubles created by digital products to be studied, understood, and make their way into that guide. Psychology and mental afflictions are still a very evolving field of medicine. DSM is changing to reflect that, a notable change between IV and V was regrouping AS into ADS because the symptoms and the underlying cause are similar. The is the case for what everyone calls digital addiction. I suspect there will be some forms of that formally coming up.
4) the dependency mechanisms work in the same way, people suffering from it have the same withdrawal symptoms. There's some valid criticism for the DSM not to categorize it as addiction (2)(3).
> Video addiction is not a thing. See how stupid it sounds when you say it like it is?
5) the author's struggle to disconnect is real, the impact on their life is real, their pain is real. I am not sure what authorizes you to discard their pain, and to qualify this as stupid. Show a little empathy.
1: And that's the problem: people believing they know what addiction is and applying it to pretty much anything they or others like to do. It's like how people who are a little finicky would say, "Yeah, that's my ADHD." but it's not. The other groups advocating for useless loose definitions of "addiction" are typically scam groups that run paid seminars for things like "porn addiction". About as legit as anti-homosexual camps.
2: This is a legit argument. In the past people may have used the word addiction to cover many things. But it is no longer the year 1900.
3: I guess we better wait till your prediction additions to the DSM6 happen then. I think it more likely that gambling disorder will be removed than additional behavioral "addiction" disorders put in. I'm not sure what the folding of aspergers into autism spectrum disorders has to do with this?
4: Claiming that there are psysiological withdrawl symptoms from watching youtube is absurd. There are not. Show me the journal article supporting such an outlandish claim. Dependency also has a meaning in this context and merely missing something psychologically isn't it. Psychological dependence is not physiological dependence and neither are addiction. Just like how no one is addicted to benzodiazapines: they become physiologically dependent and experience widthdrawl but addiction requires more.
5: Personal anecdotes and emotional appeals are not valid arguments. I'm sorry the person is having psych troubles but "youtube" is not the cause.
Note that the DIS also categorizes gaming disorders under addictive behaviors, I encourage you to read the definition for "other disorders resulting from addictive behaviours", that the author's description matches.
I do appreciate you linking to articles but these articles are pretty terrible.
re #1: The WHO adding internet addiction reflects the amount of sway China's political processes have over WHO declarations more than anything else. Their internal political narrative is that this is a problem and the WHO is being used to support that. The repetition of the falsified blue light hypothesis re: sleep is also informative re: the quality of citation #1. As for "changes in glutamatergic and gabaergic" signalling... if that doesn't happen when it means you're brain dead. Glutamate or GABA expressing neurons literally make up ~3/4 of the neuronal cells in the brain. And both are regulated extraceullary by glial cells too. You cannot do anything without changing this. If they'd done fMRI or PET or something and could shown long term abberant changes in the glutamergic signalling in the shell of the nucelus accumbens then maybe it'd be saying something. But they don't and I'm getting ahead of myself.
Citation #2 shows that when people are doing something relaxing and then they stop doing it they aren't as relaxed. That's hardly surprising. The arguments seem to be pop-sci level characterizations of the brain where any change is seen as significant or having a valance, good or bad.
And then they go and cite obviously false out-dated concepts like the idea of dopaminergic cells being neccessary or sufficient for expressions of pleasure/reward,
> Dopamine plays a critical role in this circuitry, for the subjective pleasure associated with positive rewards, and the motivation or drive-related reinforcements associated with eating, drinking, or drugs [73,74]
>The initially pleasant, so-called rewarding effects of the drug are relayed by the release of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens (NA) by the synaptic endings from the neurons of the ventral tegmental area (VTA) of the mesocorticolimbic circuitry [79,80].
It's actually glutamergic cells in the shell of the nucleus accumbens that are necessary and sufficient (but not all encompassing) for pleasure expression in mammals. Dopaminergic neurons can be blocked off with antagonists and the expression is still complete. The modern understanding is that mesolimbic dopaminergic populations encode for wanting and reward prediction. Glutamergic cells encode for reward/pleasure. I'd hope that someone writing a policy paper like this would cite up to date knowledge but it is excusable and a side point.
The real problem with #2 is that it doesn't actually talk about withdrawl symptoms in "digital addicts". It talks about widthdrawl symptoms and neurochemistry known in actual drug addicts and then just implicitly applies that all these statements must apply to the behavior "digital addiction" too. They don't show data about "digital addiction" withdrawl.
The third article is behind a cloudflare wall and I cannot access it.
Per why AS/ASD, the logic was that AS is in the mild section of the syndrom. You can probably draw a parallel to digital addiction, which everyone can agree is a much less severe form of addiction than substance addiction.
Video addiction is not a thing. See how stupid it sounds when you say it like it is?